Art ambassador

How does it feel to be the artist representing the United States at this year’s Venice Biennale? Edward Ruscha sums it up in a four-letter word -- gulp.

If his response were writ large in one of his paintings, it might appear to float in the sky above Los Angeles, the city that has supplied him with images and ideas for nearly 50 years. His spoken “gulp” seems to fill the air in his industrial-style studio in Venice, Calif., as he talks about the prestigious international contemporary art exhibition in that other Venice, across the Atlantic Ocean in Italy.

“The ‘gulp’ word comes up very easily,” said Ruscha, who is never at a loss for words in his art but speaks with laconic wit. “I guess I have no excuses now. I have to do it. I did accept the mission.”

Not that he is unaccustomed to recognition. Ruscha, who was born in Omaha in 1937 and raised in Oklahoma City, came to Los Angeles fresh out of high school, studied at Chouinard Art Institute and soon became a star in L.A.’s burgeoning art scene. A master of American vernacular who spices a Pop sensibility with Conceptual twists and ambiguous meanings, he has created a distinctive body of paintings, prints, drawings, books and films that have been exhibited all over the world.

“Being in the 212 area code would have given me more opportunity to be noticed,” he said, when asked if plying his trade in Los Angeles, rather than New York, had slowed his rise to international prominence. But his career has never languished, and interest in his art has soared in the last few years.

Last year the Royal Academy of Arts in London elected Ruscha an Honorary Academician, placing him in an elite league of 20 artistic luminaries who reside outside Britain, including Americans such as architect Frank Gehry, sculptor Richard Serra and painters Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. Ruscha will stop in London on his way to Venice to launch an exhibition of his work at the academy. Closer to home, a major show of his drawings organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York made its debut there last summer, then traveled to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and Washington’s National Gallery of Art, where it continues through May 30.

Still, there’s nothing quite like the Venice Biennale. Documenta, an international contemporary art show established in the 1950s in Kassel, Germany, and a plethora of younger, less distinguished extravaganzas present a global melange of contemporary art. The 110-year-old spectacle in Venice is more akin to an old-fashioned world’s fair. Although the Italian event has grown enormously with the addition of a massive international group show and temporary installations all over town, the historic core is a group of pavilions built by individual nations.

“One thing this Venice Biennale thing has done is to make me focus on being an American,” Ruscha said. “You can’t help it. They make the rules and they have these nationalistic entries from each country. That does focus you on your origins. So I am feeling the fact that I am an American in Venice. I feel good about that. I take it from a particularly American perspective.”

His work will fill the U.S. pavilion, a Colonial Neoclassic-style building that opened in 1930.

“I love the building,” Ruscha said. “It kind of resembles Monticello. It immediately hearkens you back to Thomas Jefferson, so that sort of pulls you home. If it was just a homogenized kind of international architecture, it wouldn’t be the same. It’s not considered a landmark or a great building, but it stands alone. It has a particularly American sense, and the place where it is, in Venice, gives it a real potency.”

As for how he is going to fill the U.S. pavilion, mum is mostly the word until the June 9 reception and June 10 press preview. He plans to unveil a series of paintings inspired by his 1992 “Blue Collar” works, which depict recycled industrial buildings in what he calls “an imaginary time jump.” Five new pieces will be displayed with five older ones. The paintings have something to do with “expressing my doubts about the progress of the world as such,” he said. But that’s as far as he would go in describing the project.

Why the secrecy?

“Oh, for once, why not?” he asked. “I’d rather have it be done, step back and let people feel what they want. I think going there and seeing it will have its results.”

Viewers aren’t likely to find that he has had an attack of artistic patriotism in creating his show for the U.S. pavilion -- or that he has made any other radical change.

“I don’t feel that I have a duty to pictorially represent my nation,” he said, “and I’m not sure I do surprises. These things are extensions of my other work. It just so happened that these thoughts came along at this absolutely perfect time.”

This is Ruscha’s first experience as the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale, but it’s not his first appearance there. In the 1970 edition, as part of a group printmaking project organized by Henry Hopkins, a now-retired, veteran museum director who most recently led the UCLA Hammer Museum, he transformed one of the pavilion’s two large galleries into his “Chocolate Room” by covering the walls with 360 shingle-like sheets of chocolate-coated paper. In the 1986 exhibition, Ruscha painted the words “vanishing cream” in Vaseline on a black wall in another building.

“Those projects were dismantled, and they just went into the ages,” he said, although a few of the silk-screened chocolate shingles have survived, and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art has a re-creation of “Chocolate Room” in its permanent collection.

This year’s project is expected to have a much longer life.

“These paintings are not going to be discarded after the show comes down,” he said. “They could go in other sites as well and develop into something else. The way I usually work with my art is, one thing nudges me and urges me onto something else.”

With the opening of the exhibition just a few weeks off, Ruscha said he was ready “to bring the product to the party.” But less than a year ago, it wasn’t certain who -- if anyone -- would play that role at the U.S. pavilion.

The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation, longtime backers of American participation in the biennale, had withdrawn their support, citing other priorities. The National Endowment for the Arts, which oversees the exhibition under the umbrella of the U.S. State Department, subsequently disbanded the artist selection committee while considering other ways to organize and fund the event.

A controversy erupted when the State Department approached the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York about organizing the exhibition. Critics argued for an open, democratic process run by a jury of art professionals.

As a stopgap measure, curators and directors of four institutions -- the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- formed an ad hoc committee to choose an artist for 2005. Ruscha was notified of his appointment in late October.

That didn’t leave much time to do his work, but he had already conceived a plan for submission to the original committee by Linda Norden, associate curator of contemporary art at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and Donna De Salvo, then a senior curator at the Tate Modern in London and now associate director for programs and curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney.

Under the new, one-time-only system, Ruscha got to choose the curator who would serve as commissioner of the U.S. pavilion. He called Norden, who enlisted De Salvo as her consulting curator. The State Department and the NEA subsequently signed an agreement to establish a new selection process for future biennales.

Despite the upset, De Salvo said, “it has all worked out the right way. The timing is quite right because it caps a momentum of awareness and appreciation of Ed and his vision. He has such a strong presence in Los Angeles and so much of his work really speaks to that landscape, but Los Angeles is such a mixture that it has become a kind of paradigm for the world.”

Ruscha’s work, Norden said, “is really consonant with this age of information. We are so bombarded with images and information that our heads are full of things we haven’t processed. His work is attentive to that and to the idea that a painting can be a kind of receiver for information that is not interpreted.”

“There’s also a way in which Ed seems cool,” she said. “I think it has to do with a deadpan, with a certain distance he has taken. The works are intensely personal, but at a remove. I think that enables the work to appeal really broadly.”

While others pondered the attraction of his work, Ruscha reflected upon the beginning of his career.

“When I first saw L.A., I just felt this is like Santa’s workshop,” said the artist, who works in a cavernous, bare-bones space filled with rolling tables of neatly arranged materials and tools. “I loved it for that. There was so much material, so many subjects. It was overwhelming. You can say the same about New York, but New York is like Europe. This was wilder country, I guess, settled later. And the sun shined all the time. It just had this tie-in with glamour. It was just loaded with inspiration. It has its crass side too. And the crass side of it motivates me.”

L.A.’s art scene has changed significantly, he said. “In the early ‘60s, this place was so provincially tiny. The galleries, the outlets for an artist’s work were very limited, but at the same time, it was vital. And we did have Walter Hopps,” he said of the influential curator who died in March. “He was a prime motivator, almost like a mentor to me. He was aloof to the commercial aspects of art. That was inspiring.”

With that, Ruscha confessed a certain sadness about his exhibition in Venice: “I regret Walter Hopps not seeing what I have done.”